A number of films of the 2000s and 2010s frame relationships between humans and non-humans in terms of love. Avatar (James Cameron, 2009), which follows a human hero as he acquires an environmental conscience through a romantic relationship with the daughter of an alien chief, is the best known and most commercially successful film of this trend. Avatar achieved unprecedented worldwide box-office success – a record not surpassed until 2019 with Avengers: Endgame (Anthony Russo and Joe Russo, 2019), another apocalyptic blockbuster with environmental themes (Clode 2019; Russo 2019) – as well as significant funds and awareness for environmental causes. Other recent films similarly centre on loving relationships with or between non-human characters and suggest that these relationships are somehow key to human redemption and environmental harmony: in Bee Movie (Simon J. Smith and Steve Hickner, 2007), the improbable romance between a bee and a human woman helps the world narrowly avoid ecological catastrophe when bees stop pollinating flowers; in The Mermaid (Stephen Chow, 2016), a polluting billionaire falls in love with the mermaid who is sent to kill him in revenge for the destruction of her home, resulting in the billionaire devoting his life and fortune to environmental conservation; in WALL-E (Andrew Stanton, 2008), the romance between two robots in an apocalyptic distant future spurs a chain of events that inspires humans to correct their ways and devote themselves to the restoration of Earth's natural systems. That these recent films use the trope of redemptive love to solve environmental problems is not surprising given the preponderance of happy endings in popular and genre cinemas: though WALL-E, The Mermaid and Avatar all explicitly acknowledge the threat posed by capitalism's exploitation of the environment – all three place the blame on specific corporations or resource extraction processes, from the mining of Unobtanium in Avatar to the megacorporation Buy-N-Large in Wall-E to the development of an ocean reserve by the billionaire's company in The Mermaid – none of these films conclude by leaving the spectator in a state of discomfort about the future. Instead, they assert that ecological catastrophe can be avoided through individual action, a type of resolution that aligns with the neoliberal ‘assumption that market individualism is the key to economic and social progress’ (Cheshire and Lawrence, 2005: 436).